No friday funnies here today!

- You can't correspond with your mother because she doesn't have a computer.
- When your email box shows "no new messages" and you feel really depressed.
- You don't know the gender of your three closest friends because they have nondescript screen name and you never bothered to ask.
- You move into a new house and you decide to "Netscape" before you landscape.
- Your family always knows where you are.
- In real life conversations, you don't laugh, you just say "LOL, LOL".
- After reading this message, you immediately forward it to a friend!

Scary story for a DBA & Systems Administrator - by a DBA

"Backups. We all know the importance of making a backup of our most important systems. Unfortunately, some of us also know that realizing the importance of performing backups often is a lesson learned the hard way. Everyone has their scary backup stories. Here are mine.

"Like a lot of people, my professional career started out in technical support. In my case, I was part of a help-desk team for a large professional practice. Among other things, we were responsible for performing PC LAN backups for a number of systems used by other departments. For one especially important system, we acquired fancy new tape-backup equipment and a large collection of tapes. A procedure was put in place, and before-you-go-home-at-night backups became a standard. Some months later, a crash brought down the system, and all the data was lost. Shortly thereafter, a call came in for the latest backup tape. It was located and dispatched, and a recovery was attempted. The recovery failed, however, as the tape was blank. A call came in for the next-to-last backup tape. Nervously, it was located and dispatched, and a recovery was attempted. It also failed because this tape also was blank. Amid long silences and pink-slip glares, panic started to set in as the tape from three nights prior was called up. This attempt resulted in a lot of shouting.

"All the tapes were then checked, and they were all blank. To add insult to injury, the problem wasn't only that the tapes were blank--they weren't even formatted! The fancy new backup equipment wasn't smart enough to realize the tapes were not formatted, so it allowed them to be used. Note: writing good data to an unformatted tape is never a good idea..."